Journal of Moral Education ISSN: 0305-7240 (Print) 1465-3877 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjme20 Bioconservatism, bioenhancement and backfiring Tamara Kayali Browne & Steve Clarke To cite this article: Tamara Kayali Browne & Steve Clarke (2020) Bioconservatism, bioenhancement and backfiring, Journal of Moral Education, 49:2, 241-256, DOI: 10.1080/03057240.2019.1576125 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2019.1576125 © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Published online: 01 Apr 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1173 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjme20 JOURNAL OF MORAL EDUCATION 2020, VOL. 49, NO. 2, 241–256 https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2019.1576125 ARTICLE Bioconservatism, bioenhancement and backfiring Tamara Kayali Browne a,b and Steve Clarke b,c aSchool of Medicine, Faculty of Health, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia; bSchool of Humanities and Social Sciences, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia; cWellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom ABSTRACT KEYWORDS The prospect of enhancing ourselves through the use of new backfire; bioconservatism; biotechnologies is for the most part, hypothetical. Nevertheless, bioenhancement; Brave New the question of whether we should undertake such enhancement World; conservative; is worthy of discussion as it may become possible in the future. In enhancement; moral education this article, we consider one form of argument that conservative opponents of biotechnological means of enhancement (biocon- servatives) deploy in opposition to the use of enhancement tech- nologies—the backfiring objection. This is the objection that the use of such technologies is liable to go wrong and lead to out- comes that are inferior to the outcomes intended. We will argue that the objection is not nearly as significant as bioconservatives suppose it to be. Bioconservatives sometimes supplement the backfiring objection by arguing that change will be irreversible, that the new (or the unconventional) is especially liable to backfire and that humans possess severe and permanent limitations which cannot be overcome. We consider these ways of supplementing the backfiring objection and argue that each of them, when properly understood, is of limited value to the bioconservative. We also consider how traditional approaches to moral education can be supplemented by bioenhancement. Introduction The prospect of humans using new biotechnologies to enhance themselves has been the subject of considerable controversy, and has aroused the opposition of ‘bioconserva- tives’ who are adamant that we ought not to use biotechnologies to enhance ourselves. They raise many distinct arguments against human bioenhancement.1 ‘Bioconservative’ is a term that is often used to describe those who wish to conserve humanity as it is, and so oppose human enhancement. Although it is quite possible to be a bioconservative without being a political conservative, many bioconservatives, such as Leon Kass (2003) and Francis Fukuyama (2002), are more generally politically conservative.2 It has recently been suggested by a number of recent ‘bioliberal’ and ‘biomoderate’ critics of bioconservatism that, by their own lights, bioconservatives who are also political conservatives should be in favour of at least some enhancements. In the conservative political tradition, the fixity of human nature is stressed, as is its flawedness (Kekes, 1998, pp. 41–42). Humans, say conservatives, are selfish, impulsive CONTACT Tamara Kayali Browne [email protected] © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 242 T. K. BROWNE AND S. CLARKE and often motivated by base feelings of envy, pride, spite and so on and moral education will not do anything to significantly alter their characteristics. They also have distinctly limited cognitive capacities and regularly make bad decisions. But, say these recent critics of bioconservatism, the use of human bioenhancement technologies offers us opportunities to overcome the fixity of human nature and ameliorate our flaws. One example of this line of argument being developed is due to Roache and Savulescu (2016). They engage with Fukuyama’s(2002) concern that if we become enhanced post-humans then we may lose some intrinsically valuable feature of being human, which he is unable to define and which he dubs ‘Factor X’. Factor X might include some combination of humility, an appreciation of ‘giftedness’, dignity, ‘open- ness to the unbidden’, or whatever other feature of humanness may be threatened by bioenhancement (Roache and Savulescu, 2016, pp. 150–151). Their response is to point out that Fukuyama cannot be offering a general objection to human bioenhancement. If Factor X is the intrinsically valuable feature of humanity that ought not to be lost then Fukuyama can have no well-founded objection to enhancing Factor X itself (Roache and Savulescu, 2016, p. 151).3 Similarly, it is argued by Kaebnick (2016) that it is difficult for anyone to be straightforwardly opposed to the idea of moral bioenhance- ment, even for those who are generally opposed to human bioenhancement, as almost everyone is in favour of more moral behaviour.4 Because conservatives stress the moral shortcomings of ordinary humans, and see these failures as a barrier to attempts to reform human societies, it seems that they should be particularly in favour of moral bioenhancement. Suitably morally bioenhanced individuals would be more likely, it seems, to help create more cohesive societies—a key conservative ideal—than the many un-morally enhanced, vice-ridden individuals who we currently find beside us in unenhanced human societies. A way conservatives can respond to the above lines of reasoning is to concede that a society in which Factor X and/or morality was suitably enhanced would be preferable to current societies but to argue that we should not attempt to create such a society because attempts to do so are liable to backfire and lead, inadvertently, to the creation of societies that are worse, rather than better, than current human societies. Appeals to ‘backfiring’ have long been a key weapon in the conservative intellectual arsenal; and conservatives have long been opposed to social engineering projects on the grounds that these are likely to backfire (O’Hara, 2011, pp. 53–57). Some of the most prominent conservative objections to human bioenhancement are backfiring objections. Conservatives are concerned that well-meaning schemes to improve society by the use of human bioenhancements on a mass scale will backfire and lead to some or other outcome that is worse than what we have now.5 A possible response to the conservative appeal to backfiring would be to argue that even if backfiring is likely to occur it is worth taking the risk of it occurring for a chance at enhancing ourselves successfully. The conservative has several ways of replying to this response. The first is to stress that backfiring is very likely to occur. The second is to suggest that the benefits that could be obtained by successful schemes to improve ourselves are not as great as their proponents imagine them to be. We might, for example, succeed in making ourselves smarter than we are now, but there is a lack of evidence to suggest that this would make us happier than we are now (Clarke 2016b, p. 384). Similar lines of objection can be run against other proposed enhancements. A third way to respond is to argue that we ought JOURNAL OF MORAL EDUCATION 243 to adopt a particular attitude to risk, including the risk of backfiring: we should be risk averse. Almost all conservative writers advocate an attitude of risk aversion.6 Conservatives do not usually use this terminology, but their attitude to risk is very similar to the attitude of advocates of the influential ‘precautionary principle’.7 It would take us too far afield to respond to this conservative reply in detail here, but it is worth pointing out that con- servative authors do not have much to say in favour of a risk averse attitude other than to point out that it seems common-sensical. The precautionary principle is very popular but it suffers from a number of well-known conceptual problems, and so it is far from obvious that adopting the precautionary principle would help to buttress the conservative case for a risk-averse attitude.8 We will argue that the backfiring objection to human bioenhancement is not nearly as significant as conservatives often suppose it to be. Conservative opponents of human enhancement sometimes supplement the backfiring objection by arguing that change will be irreversible, by arguing that the new (or the unconventional) is especially liable to backfire, and by arguing that humans possess severe and permanent limitations which cannot be overcome. We consider these ways of supplementing the backfiring objection and argue that each of them, when properly understood, is of limited value to the conservative. For the purposes of this article we will adopt a constructivist approach to the definition of ‘enhancement’. In contrast with other approaches to the definition of ‘enhancement’, such as the welfarist approach, the normal functioning approach and the beyond-species- typical approach, the constructivist approach emphasises the role of societal norms and values in what is considered a disease (and conversely, what is considered an enhancement). According to Gyngell and Selgelid, ‘Under [the Constructivist Approach] enhancements are individually beneficial alterations to human functions or capacities which are not performed in the context of treating or preventing disease, with diseases being understood as states which are disvalued by society in a particular way’ (2016,p.112).